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Critics on the oppression of women in literature
Representation of women in literature
Critics on the oppression of women in literature
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D. Results and Findings
In the following tables, wordlist and concordance will be utilised to mirror the image of the governess in the two novels Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre, through adjectives, nouns and verbs.
Table One: Adjectives
Adjective Agnes Grey Jane Eyre
Lonely 4 22
The concordance of this example Agnes Grey
-the lonely drudgery, of my present life: for I _was _lonely. Never, from month to month, from year to year, except during my brief intervals of rest at home, did I see one creature to whom I could open my heart
Jane Eyre
-As yet I had spoken to no one, nor did anybody seem to take notice of me; I stood lonely enough: but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed; it did not oppress me much.
-But I always woke and found it an empty mockery; and I was desolate and abandoned--my life dark, lonely ,
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I have suffered martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice. I thank Heaven I have now done with them!"
The noun ‘governess’ is very significant in both novels. It elucidates how people regard the governess. Anne Bronte casts light on how the position of governess is a just a mock. The governess cannot have the needed authority over her pupils. Moreover, Charlotte Bronte also manifests how others regard the governess, how others are considering the governess ridiculous and are treating her like a servant, how others see the governess as an abhorrent creature that only causes suffrage for them.
Noun Agnes Grey Jane
“A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without
I chose this passage because it reminds me of a time when I was sick and I had eaten hardly anything and had gotten very little sleep because I was vomiting all the night through. I was lying in my bed and I looked over at my closet doors, which where sliding mirrors, and I saw myself. I looked like I had died. My face was pale, my eyes were black, and I was unusually skinny.
“…no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself…; no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee…; no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house”
“ I myself fell prey to wanderlust some years ago, desiring nothing better than to be a vagrant cloud scudding before the wind... But the year ended before I knew it... Bewitched by the god of restlessness, I lost my peace of mind; summoned by the spirits of the road, I felt unable to settle down to anything.”
In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre there are many occasions in which there is motifs about division and bias relations. Money was a major division between people in the Victorian Era. Family made people rise in the standings with others, If your family was rich or well known, then you were going to be well known and well liked. There are many situations in which Jane is thought of as poor and worthless, as well as having no family.
Human beings stand alone in the ability to meditate; to think about one’s own thinking. While humans view this as a positive aspect or even a dominant trait of their own species, this same ability can lead the thinker down a dark and depressing path. Found in the Exeter Book of Old English poetry, “The Wanderer” displays how this same ability that allows humans to grasp meaning and reason, feel a purpose and use their imaginations can also resurface memories of sadness as well as remind one of better times.
Loneliness can be compared to a coin; it has a head and a tail. To someone who is overcome by the constant influx of people or situations, loneliness can be seen as a sort of utopia; to someone who feels that they are all alone in the world, loneliness can be seen as a sort of hell. In these two works, the reader is exposed to the positive and negative aspects of being alone. Yeats' character desires to be alone because he longs to feel all of the comfort that lonesomeness has to offer; within his soul, the persona feels an intense desire to leave the fast-paced city and become one with nature (Yeats, 2093). He longs to go to is an island called Innisfree (2092) because he became infatuated with the idea of this place as a child when his father read him Thoreau's Walden. On this island he could live in a cabin, where he could grow his own food and experience all of the beauty that nature had to offer. Yeats allows his character to rationally conclude that he would rather be alone because his life is constantly being overrun by aspects of the city. Loneliness can be either positive or negative; in the case of Yeats' character, solitude was something to be treasured, while Eliot's character felt that loneliness was something to be loathed.
Following the Moral Compass in Jane Eyre Jane Eyre is the perfect novel about maturing: a child who is treated cruelly, holds herself together and learns to steer her life forward with a driving conscience that keeps her life within personally felt moral bounds. I found Jane as a child to be quite adult-like: she battles it out conversationally with Mrs. Reed on an adult level right from the beginning of the book. The hardships of her childhood made her extreme need for moral correctness believable. For instance, knowing her righteous stubbornness as a child, we can believe that she would later leave Rochester altogether rather than living a life of love and luxury simply by overlooking a legal technicality concerning her previous marriage to a mad woman. Her childhood and her adult life are harmonious, which gives the reader the sense of a complete and believable character. Actually, well into this book I  I was reminded of a friend's comment a few years back to "avoid the Brontes like the plague.
Being lonely is nothing new. Many people every day are lonely. It is common in contemporary literature to be able to see and connect with characters who suffer from mental illness. Loneliness is seen even more often in novels of today, it could even be seen as undiagnosed depression in many cases. Nathanial Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables is an excellent example of how depression is portrayed in early American novels.
In the novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte uses Jane Eyre as her base to find out how a character confronts the demands of a private passion that conflicts with her responsibilities. . Mistreated abused and deprived of a normal childhood, Jane Eyre creates an enemy early in her childhood with her Aunt Mrs. Reed. Just as Mrs. Reeds life is coming to an end, she writes to Jane asking her for forgiveness, and one last visit from her.
The Book of Common Prayer offers an intercession for “our families, friends and neighbors, and for those who are alone.” We tend to put the alone in this separate category, but for Olivia Laing, “the essential unknowability of others” means that to be human is to be lonesome, at least sometimes. So why don’t we talk about it more openly? “What’s so shameful,” she asks, about “having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness?” This daring and seductive book — ostensibly about four artists, but actually about the universal struggle to be known — raises sophisticated questions about the experience of loneliness, a state that in a crowded city provides an “uneasy combination of separation and exposure.”
Solitude. Examples are found of this idea throughout the one-hundred-year life of Macondo and the Buendia family. It is both an emotional and physical solitude. It is shown geographically, romantically, and individually. It always seems to be the intent of the characters to remain alone, but they have no control over it. To be alone, and forgotten, is their destiny.
I think that the narrator feels much alone in life, even though she has a family who cares for her. She is clinically depressed so naturally she is going to feel isolated from the world. Speaking about a house that the narrator grew up in, she writes, 'and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.
Similar to many of the great feministic novels of its time, Jane Eyre purely emerges as a story focused on the quest for love. The novel’s protagonist, Jane, searches not only for the romantic side of love, but ultimately for a sense of self-worth and independence. Set in the overlapping times of the Victorian and Gothic periods, the novel touches upon both women’s supposed rights, and their inner struggle for liberty. Orphaned at an early age, Jane was born into a modest lifestyle, without any major parent roles to guide her through life’s obstacles. Instead, she spent much of her adolescent years locked in imaginary chains, serving those around her but never enjoying the many decadences life has to offer. It is not until Jane becomes a governess that many minute privileges become available to her and offer Jane a glance at what life could have been. It is on her quest for redemption and discovery that she truly is liberated. Throughout Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre, the story’s protagonist Jane, struggles to achieve the balance of both autonomy and love, without sacrificing herself in the process.
Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, is set in a Victorian England, where social class is a huge factor in life. Brontë is very critical of Victorian England’s strict hierarchy. the main character, Jane, is a governess. Her social position is very complicated in which she has to be sophisticated, educated, intelligent, and soft spoken but she is then talked down to as she is of a lower class. The job of a governess is to teach children, whether it be art, writing or reading english literature. Victorian society is very corrupt and in the novel Brontë truly captures and illustrates the challenges that Jane has to face as a governess. The novel also emphasizes the social gap between individuals and how big it really is. In Victorian society, the rich get the most out of life and life for the poor gets harder. No individual should judge or belittle another due to the very minor factor of social status, but it seems to be very important in Jane’s society. The message that Brontë expresses in the novel is that social class is a meaningless catalyst in the progression of relationships, creating giant gaps between individuals.